Archive for the ‘Badiou’ Tag

It was suggested to me, about a month ago, that I might like to accompany my girlfriend and her ex along to a talk by this lady. It was all a bit terribly terribly/Cambridge Uni/Radio 4/boomerish for my degraded intellectual appetites but a couple of things she said I thought were quite interesting. She was talking about GM crops seed rights and how corporations were seeking to patent nature for profit, essentially, without regard for social justice etc. I’m not a sciencey person and I’m probably summarising what she said a bit too broadly but I think she linked this to a characterisation of capitalism as this gigantic machine that needs to be fed money to survive, and that now natural resources were dwindling the forces that fed the machine were having to look elsewhere. Therefore increasingly wealth is sought to be created from non-physical things like patent rights etc, which in addition to seeds etc also related to the pharmaceutical industry and financial services. As I say, I might be embellishing her actual remarks a little but this is what my brain decided it would like to hear anyway, and it’s rolled around in my mind like a jagged stone ever since as I’ve been gulping my way through Retromania, which kinda leads me to this fanciful postulation I’m in the business of awkwardly constructing. Actually it was Dom Fox on Twitter that set me thinking, but Retromania was kind of the backdrop. I’d watched The Voice at my sister’s in boozy contempt, so when he started going on about it my ears pricked up, plus I’ve been moaning about the Light Entertainmentalisation of modern reality here before innit.

7 May Dominic Fox Dominic Fox ‏ @domfox

Everything is turning into 70s light entertainment. We’ll have Bernard Manning back in a minute – suitably ironised, of course. Oh, wait…

7 May Dominic Fox Dominic Fox ‏ @domfox

…that’s Jimmy Carr.

7 May Dominic Fox Dominic Fox ‏ @domfox

The Voice is deeply weird, though – every performer gets the same gushing praise, minute variations on a formula. You *owned* that song…

Now Dom Fox is one of those people who mentions Badiou a bit too much for my, uh, understanding, so I realise that I’m running a terrible risk by quoting him and then bringing in Marx but fuckit I am not pursuing Truth. But yeah, Marx says that the specific conditions of the economic base are reflected in the superstructure and hence my retromanical analogy. Do you see where I’m going with this? The boom times is over! There’s no more gold in them thar hills! This is a ghost town! In fact you might as well re-open it as a tourist attraction! Etc.

Actually I think I need Jessie J here to help me with this one. It’s not really coming together is it? Come on Pete, believe!

I’m feeling sexy and free
Like glitter’s raining on me
Your like a shot of pure gold
I think I’m ’bout to explode